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This section was my workspace for philosophy essays between July 2006 and April 2008.
I call this "Prehistoric Kilroy" because it gave me practice for more
disciplined essays in Kilroy Cafe.Also see my philophical blog and Twitter feed.

Issue #47, 12/15/2006

Understanding Consciousness

By Glenn CampbellFamily Court Philosopher

What is consciousness? For simplicity, we can say that it
is an interactive movie playing in your head that only you
can see. At least, that's how I perceive my own
consciousness, and I can only assume that your experience is
similar to mine.

Certain aspects of consciousness will always be a mystery.
Emerging neuroscience can tell us how conscious experiences
correlate with certain physical activity in the brain, but
science will never explain how you, personally, got inserted
into the machine. For that matter, religion doesn't give you
an answer either, except that "God did it." How you
happened to be stuck in this particular movie
theatre—or inserted into this body—is unknown
and unknowable. You just have to accept it.

However, the contents of consciousness can be quite
decipherable. You don't have to understand how the
projection system works to watch and critique a film. There
are good forms of conscious processing and self-destructive
ones. Even if you don't know how "thinking" works, you know
at any moment what you are thinking about, and you probably
have a good idea of why you are thinking about it.

Consciousness has some relevance to Family Court. In court,
we are trying to manage behavior—of juvenile
delinquents, abusive parents and estranged
spouses.—and behavior is intimately linked to
conscious experience. A lot of "acting out" that makes no
objective sense on the surface does make sense within that
person's internal movie. If we entirely ignore the contents
of consciousness—that is, the feelings that people
experience when they come to court—then we probably
aren't going to change the behavior.

Although we don't know what consciousness is or where it
comes from, we can understand its framework and limitations.
If we can assemble a list of these characteristics, then it
might help us deal with both our own conscious experience
and that of others.

The analogy to a movie is a useful, because the content of
consciousness has similar characteristics. The pacing, for
example, is about the same. A movie feeds experiences to
you at about the same rate that your consciousness can
process them. If the pacing of a movie was too slow, you
would get bored and leave; if it was too fast, you would
lose track of the plot and leave. If you took a two-hour
movie and tried to watch it in fast-forward mode in fifteen
minutes, it would have very little meaning to you, because
the words and images would be happening too fast.

This brings up our first known fact about consciousness:

Fact #1: Every conscious experience takes time.

This is a very simple observation but also profound and
practical. It means that there are limits to how many
things you can think about in a given period of time. It is
hard to define exactly what your "thinking rate" is, but if
you daydream about something or ponder
some problem you are facing, there is a lapse of time,
measured in seconds or minutes, between the start of your
thought process and the end.

The practical implication of Fact #1 is that if there is
something you need to think about, you have to give yourself
the time to do it. Taking a few days before making a major
decision is always a good idea, as it gives you the time to
play through all the scenarios in your head.

Another observation about consciousness is also obvious:

Fact #2: You can only think about one thing at a
time.

In a movie, you aren't shown a car chase at the same time
you are watching a love scene, even though the filmmakers
could easily split the screen and show you both at the same
time. You can only attend to one or the other, not both.

Conscious experience is also like that: only one discrete
thought at a time. Sometimes your thoughts might integrate
two apparently disparate pieces of information, but it's
really only one thought.

The practical effect is that one thought or conscious
activity can push another out of consciousness, and in
general the most powerful and pressing thought wins. If you
are driving home from work, daydreaming as usual, and you
are involved in an accident on the highway, then that event
is going to demand your attention for a while and push the
daydreams away.

Conscious attention may seem infinite, in that you can think
about anything you want anytime you want, but in fact the
time constraints are quite limited. There is a limit to the
number of movies you can see in a day, and also a limit to
the number of thoughts you can think. This dictates that
some form of intelligent management be used to get the most
you can from your consciousness. You can't possible go to
every movie; you want to read some reviews first, then
decide deliberately which one you want to go to. Likewise,
one ought to intelligently manage one's conscious experience.

Is consciousness manageable? Can you tell your brain to
think about some things and not think about others? Maybe
or maybe not. What is certain, however, is that you can
control the outside inputs to consciousness. If you have an
important decision to make and have taken a few days to
think about it, you can choose not to watch television
during that time. If you turn on the TV, you know it is
going to suck your conscious attention and block you from
thinking about other things.

The management of consciousness is important because most of
our higher reasoning seems to take place there.

Fact #3: Consciousness is required for complex
decision-making.

You don't need conscious awareness for most of the mundane
tasks of life. Once you learn how to drive, for example,
you become quite unaware of your foot on the gas or your hand
on the steering wheel unless something draws your attention
to these things. Instead, you become more concerned about
where you are heading rather than how you are getting there.

If you have driven the same route to work every weekday
morning for the past seven years, then you are mostly
doing it on "automatic" without much conscious intervention.
Your body knows when to switch lanes and when to signal
without you having to think about it. In general, the only
things that you are consciously aware of are the unusual
events that you don't see every day. Some days, you may
even "space out": losing yourself in some reverie for ten
minutes while the car drives itself. When you "come to," you
look around in a daze and have to figure out where you are.

You stop spacing out as soon as some unexpected event occurs
that demands your attention. If somebody cuts you off on the
highway or you suddenly find yourself in potential danger,
then consciousness kicks in immediately, and you start
analysing your potential options. There is something about
these complex tasks that requires the involvement of
conscious awareness.

In an aircraft, simple in-flight navigation can be handled
by the autopilot, but only a human pilot can perform
take-offs and landings. The human is also necessary to
occasionally monitor the autopilot, in case something
happens this is too complicated for it to handle. On the
ground, each of us has many systems that operate on
autopilot most of the time, but we wouldn't want to fire the
human pilot, because those automated systems can fail very
easily in anomalous situations.

If you are driving your usual route to work but
actually intend to go someplace else, then your nervous
system may take you to work anyway. Deliberate conscious
intervention is required to change course and get where you
really want to go.

Perhaps one of the most terrifying human experiences to wake
up in the morning with a hangover and no memory of what you
did the night before. In the absence of conscious
monitoring, do you really trust yourself? For all you know,
you could have killed someone during that missing time, and
without consciousness, you have no basis for saying that it
did or didn't occur.

Only consciousness gives us the confidence that we are in
control of ourselves, in part because of the next fact.

Fact #4: Consciousness is required for memory.

There are many events that we were conscious of in the past
that we might not remember right now, but virtually all of
the events we remember now, we were conscious of at the
time. Whatever consciousness may be, it needs to be "turned
on" for a long-term memory to be formed (or at least the
kind of episodic memory that can consciously be played
back).

To remember where you parked you car in a large parking lot,
all you need to do is make yourself conscious of it at the
time. If you note to yourself when you park the car, "I'm
in section B-2," then you don't even need to write it down
to remember it. On the other hand, if you aren't conscious
of your location at the time of parking, then you are going
to be searching for your car later, even though your eyes
saw where your parked and your body walked you from there.

Human memory is symbolic, not photographic. We remember
certain important aspects of a scene or event, not the whole
thing. To conserve storage space, every memory is compressed
into the smallest possible package, based on the conscious
processing that took place at the time. Therefore, the
quality of this real-time processing is important.

If you happen to be in a convenience store during a hold-up,
you may notice and remember only a few details about the
robber. An off-duty police officer is probably going to
recall more than you did, because he knew, even before the
event occurred, what sort of information the police would
need.

Likewise, your memory for any event is going to reflect how
well you used your consciousness at the time. Consciousness
should not be a passive phenomenon, where things just happen
to you and you simply respond. You should be actively
molding the experience as it happens. If nothing else, you
can move your eyes and shift your attention to gather
information that you expect will be useful later.

Fact #5: Consciousness is continuous and connected.

From your viewpoint, you have never been unconscious. To you,
consciousness has been a continuous phenomenon that
stretched from early childhood to the present moment. Even
when you go to sleep, seven hours seem to go by in an instant
and you wake up in the morning with no direct awareness that
time has passed.

In your inner world, one thought flows into another and
another, with no apparent breaks. The only disruptions are
when an outside event intrudes. This provides a fresh
stimulus for a new chain of thought.

The potential pool of memories and speculations available to
consciousness is essentially infinite, but our actual
thoughts may be quite restricted. We are probably not going
to think about something unless it is topically connected to
our previous thought or an outside event. If you remember
something that happened to you when you were ten years old,
it is only because a previous thought or outside event
evoked that memory. Truly random thoughts are very unusual.
Ideas don't just pop into your head; they are topically
evoked.

To use an internet analogy, conscious experience is like
"surfing the web." One webpage has links to others. When
you click on one link, it leads you to another page, which
contains more links. Eventually, you may end up from where you
started, but there was a continuous sequence of connections
that lead you there.

Occasionally, an unexpected webpage may be forced in front
of you—a pop-up window. This is the outside world
intruding into your stream of consciousness. Maybe this
unsolicited window tells you, "I'm hungry!" and it keeps
popping up on your screen until you do something about it.
This page, in turn, contains it's own set of links, which
eventually lead you to the refrigerator. Once satiated, that
pop-up window goes away, and you can go back to the surfing
you were doing before.

Memories and experiences are not accessible if they are not
connected to this web. You are not necessarily
"suppressing" these memories; you just have no current route
for accessing them.

Sometimes, however, certain memories and conscious
experiences are blocked by a webpage that you find
unpleasant. Whenever you land on that webpage, you become
distressed, and you back up quickly and choose another link.
Surrounded by these anxiety-producing pages, you can be
trapped in a well-worn pattern where, say, you are only
accessing hockey websites and nothing else. This can
restrict your vision and limit your growth.

That is why it is important to encourage random inputs to
consciousness—occasional pop-up windows that you have
little control over. These might provide access to areas
you would not otherwise visit and give you a richer
perspective on life. These random pages shouldn't happen
too often, because you have to have time to process them, but
they are as important to health as diversity in the gene
pool.

Fact #6: Consciousness is deeply emotional and
personal.

What passes through consciousness is not just a series of
facts and abstract problems but profoundly personal things
that you wouldn't necessarily want to share with others. You are
thinking about jealousies, frustrations and bodily
functions. Thankfully, a mind reading device is not
currently available, because none of us would want to submit
to it. We need our private workspace to figure things out.
Only after we have cogitated for a while, in our own unique
way, are we ready to activate the mouth or fingers and
produce a public output.

Our conscious thoughts, if they were ever made public, would
probably be embarrassing, but our actions don't have to be.
It is only our actions that count in the world. Consciousness
is the space where we formulate them, according to whatever
methods suit us.

You wouldn't want the government or your next-door neighbors
rummaging around in your consciousness. In spite of the
frequent social admonishment to "share your feelings," you
ought to cache most of them until they are
in a refined state where they should be shared. Your
feelings are part of your own private control system, and
you should share them only when you have considered their
impact on others. Raw conscious impressions
are rarely good to share. At least to some extent, you must
repackage them for public consumption. The package should
resemble what you are really feeling, but consciousness
always needs to be simplified and sanitized before it is
expressed openly.

Fundamentally, you have to deal with consciousness alone. No
one can directly experience the same things you are. There
may be some close parallels between your awareness and
someone else's, but they are relatively rare, and you have to
rely on your own experience most of the time. You can try to
merge with another person, but there is always a limit to
how far it can go. Ultimately, you are responsible for
your inner life, and he is responsible for his.

If, in any relationship, you neglect the autonomy needs of
consciousness—your own or someone
elses—eventually it is going to bite you. Attempts to
merge the unmergable usually end in disaster—often in
Family Court. In every relationship, there have to be
boundaries, and you need to identify and respect them if you
want to avoid a explosion.